Husband, wife to perform at Gala Season Opener

Liesl Schoenberger Doty said the first anniversary of the wedding of her and her husband, Karl, coincidentally falls right in line with when the couple will be in Cape Girardeau to perform in the Gala Season Opener concert at Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus.

It's fitting because they were married here.

"We didn't think we were going to be back in Cape Girardeau on our one-year anniversary and that we would be performing with the symphony, so that's pretty cool that happened," Schoenberger said.

Cape Girardeau is home for Schoenberger. It's where she found her passion for the violin. She said she was enrolled in a Suzuki violin program at Southeast when she was still, more or less, a baby. She won a fiddle contest at the SEMO District Fair at the age of 9. From there, she was hooked.

She first soloed with the Southeast Missouri Symphony Orchestra in 2001, during her senior year of high school, and twice since -- in 2005 and 2010. When professor Brandon Christensen took a sabbatical in spring 2010, he asked Schoenberger to fill in for him.

Schoenberger's musical background is rooted in Southeast Missouri. Now, she's sharing it with her husband.

The Gala Season Opener will be at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Bedell Performance Hall. Sara Edgerton, director of the symphony orchestra in addition to a cello and string bass professor at Southeast, said the event developed 15 years ago out of former university president Kenneth Dobbins' interest in putting together a symphony series.

"The orchestra had been growing the first 10 years that I was here," Edgerton said. "Then President Dobbins, in anticipation of the move to the River Campus, wanted to establish a symphony series. It was through that impetus that we started to think about, the first of the series, the concerts would be called the Gala Season Opener because I've always brought in special guests."

Schoenberger and her husband live in Boston. They are two of 17 members who make up the Grammy-nominated chamber orchestra A Far Cry. Doty was a founding bassist for the self-conducted group.

"The group itself is pretty extraordinary," Schoenberger said. "The model of classical music and what it means to be a successful classical musician is changing a lot, especially in the past couple of decades. This group is really on the forefront of that change by being 17 co-artistic directors and by stretching the boundaries of the kinds of people and groups that we collaborate with as classical musicians."

Both Schoenberger and Doty teach, too. She has positions at Dartmouth College, the University of New Hampshire and Saint Anselm College, while Doty is an instructor at Bates College in Maine.

Schoenberger said there are two types of musicians -- those who leave the music at work and those who make their life around the art. She and Doty are the latter.

"It's pretty amazing to be able to come home and continue living in that art all the time, because that's what art is. It's an expression of life," Schoenberger said. "When we get to play together all of the time, whether it's in A Far Cry or whether we're playing duo stuff, I think the most amazing part about it is that he's always inspiring me as a musician and not just as a person or not just as my husband or my partner in life, but he really inspires me musically all the time."

She said the first half of Tuesday's program features works such as Camille Saint-Sa'ns' "Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso," highlighting the violin, and "Grand Duo for Violin, String Bass and Orchestra" by Giovanni Bottesini. Doty also arranged a piece for the concert to include the string bass, originally composed just for violin and orchestra.

"Liesl and Karl really represent the cutting edge," Edgerton said. "They're interested in lots of crossover music; they reach out to a lot of new audiences with the group that they perform with in Boston. They're very innovative. It's a really, really good paradigm for our students to see how you can really flourish as musicians in the 21st century."

Edgerton and Schoenberger agreed the string bass is somewhat of an uncommon soloist instrument.

"String bass is kind of unusual, to have a string bass solo with the orchestra," Edgerton said. "That's kind of a first, so that will be really worth coming to."

"Then to have a violin and bass thing together and be able to see the two instruments really having a conversation and being able to talk to each other on stage should be pretty exciting," Schoenberger said.

When it comes to her husband, she said he's a "risk taker" and a "daredevil" in the way he plays.

The symphony orchestra will conclude the Gala Season Opener with Antonin Dvorak's "New World Symphony."

While parts of the show are different from Schoenberger's typical setting, she said she goes into every performance with the same excitement.

"I love the connections that happen on stage," Schoenberger said. "Whenever you're playing in a group or by yourself or whatever it is, there's something, almost like a drug, about being on stage and connecting with the audience. I think that drug is what keeps people in show business for all of their life, even when it's really, really tough, because that experience and that feeling on stage of connecting with all of the people around you, connecting with human beings, connecting souls and connecting in a real way is the whole reason why we engage in expressive art to begin with."